This research explores the law enforcement view of serious organised crime in Scotland set within a framework that explores organised crime in terms of its history, definition, group structure, violence and its capacity for corruption. While the focus of the work is on organised crime groups operating in Scotland, organised crime is a global phenomenon consequently, the research draws upon both national and international sources, exploring the literature, research, legal rules, conventions and protocols. The research is however centered upon law enforcement perceptions of serious organised crime as it is manifest in Scotland. Therefore, this dissertation reports the views of Scottish law enforcement personnel obtained using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Disability is argued to have some relation to gender and culture. However much disability and gender research is based on data collected in the Global North, and little is known about disabled women in the Global South. This thesis therefore sets to explore how disabled women in Malaysia experience their lives. Malaysia is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country located in the heart of South East Asia. It is now recognised as an upper-middle income country but was previously considered as a lower income country following its independence from Britain in 1957. Although the Malaysian government has developed significant disability provision, policies and legislations since the period of colonialism, disabled people still encounter major barriers in many aspects of their lives. More importantly research involving Malaysian disabled women is very limited and this study seeks to fill the gap.

Territories of neoliberal urbanization have expanded as local and central governments around the world have increasingly approached and utilized urban land as a rent-­‐generating tool that can as well reproduce the workings of advanced capitalism in full effect. It has thus been inevitable to see the expansion of the territories of urban oppositional movements in direct proportion to the globalization of neoliberal urbanism. Currently, civil, supranational and grassroots organizations are actively raising critical questions with respect to the diminishing chances of citizens to access affordable housing, public spaces, natural reserves, urban resources and services, participatory decision-­‐making mechanisms at the level of local governance etc. Departing from here, what is being witnessed is the reintroduction of debates on the ‘rights to the city’ as coined by Henri Lefebvre (1968) and further tackled by David Harvey (2008) to the agenda of contentious urban politics. However, although there is growing literature on the skilful battles of oppositional movements against the forces of capital in various cities of the world, challenges encountered by movements, or the fragilities and vulnerabilities they might experience remain relatively understudied. This poses a matter of concern regarding that it can only be through the acknowledgement and transfer of knowledge emanating from battles against such challenges and vulnerabilities that learning processes can be enhanced and more sustainable movements can be built for the future. Istanbul’s experience is not divorced from any of these developments and thus falls into the coverage of these territories of neoliberal globalization and urban contestation along the given lines. State-­‐led urban transformation projects targeting informal housing zones, inner-­‐city poverty areas, coastlines, large tracts of state owned, and natural and historic reserves, and oppositional views raised against these novel expressions of urban development by diverse civil initiatives can all be interpreted as narratives that reveal the contingency of Istanbul within the given territories. Yet, just as similar to the international context, the Turkish experience has not so far tackled the question of challenges to movement building in the face of such immense pressures as much as needed. The cases of Sulukule and Tarlabaşı, however, are highly revealing of the fact that it is incredibly difficult for socio-­‐economically disadvantaged communities to sustain their mode of mobilized resistance against forces of urban transformation since the given forces instigate imminent divides within communities based on the will to access certain securities and gains. That is, although collective resistance and opposition to urban transformation may emanate from poverty zones, a tendency to settle for material securities and gains may also emerge depending on the individually defined capacities of residents as the fear of loss in the battle against transformation climbs. Private ownership and its impact on grassroots mobilization deserves particular attention within the given set of constellations.

This thesis is a case study of suicide reporting which investigates the contribution of the British national press to the construction of the Bridgend problem. It aims to provide an insight into journalists’ role in the ‘social problems game’ by assessing the level to which their post-2008 extensive Bridgend coverage rose concern over the issue and compelled an official response to it. To this end, the content of 451 relevant news reports was qualitatively analysed and in-depth interviews with 13 key claims-makers were conducted. The thesis documents the evolution of the Bridgend problem over time. The elements that added to the newsworthiness of the story and resulted in its transition from the local to the national press are identified and closely examined. The analysis of the national news coverage reveals the central role of ‘causality’ and ‘morality’ in the Bridgend narrative as well as four main frames through which the local suicide problem has been made sense of: ‘Internet Suicide’ raises questions about online memorials glamorising suicide, pro-suicide websites and the ‘dark side’ of the Internet in general. ‘Suicide Contagion’ considers the risk of imitative suicides posed by new or traditional media. ‘Breakdown Britain’ attributes the Bridgend phenomenon to local deprivation and a deeper social malaise. Finally, ‘Mental Health’ underlines the emotional vulnerability of young people, the stigmatisation of mental illness and the deficiencies in mental health care. Underlining the status of the Bridgend case as a point of reference, the final part of this project assesses its aftermath in terms of the immediate policy responses to it and its long-term implications. It is argued that, despite its commercial and ideological exploitation, the Bridgend situation has, even if belatedly, brought attention to the alarmingly high occurrence of youth suicides in the area, while highlighting the importance of responsible suicide coverage. The thesis concludes by suggesting that the links between suicide reporting, awareness and prevention need to be strengthened and considers the means through which this goal could be attained in the post-Leveson era.

This thesis explores the motivations, patterns and dynamics of young offenders' illicit drug use in prison. Based on qualitative research with thirty inmates and ten prison officers in a Young Offenders Institution the thesis describes the nature of inmates' drug use; the impact of the prison context on inmates' motivations to use; and the relationship between time and drug use. Drug markets, the nature of drug supply and their relationship with the dominant inmate culture is also discussed. The theory of legitimacy is related to staff and inmates' attitudes towards drug control and mandatory drug testing in prison. The conclusion identifies four main factors that influenced inmates' drug use in prison: individual, structural, relational and societal. Individual factors relate to the inmates' drug use before custody, stressing the need to understand the connection between inmates' drug using lifestyles outside and inside prison. Structural factors relate to the structures and regimes in prison. The organisation of prison life influenced when drugs were used and the motivation for using. The relational factors highlight the extent to which staff prisoner relationships influence trafficking and drug use in prison. Understanding inmates' relationships also provides an insight into drug markets, supply and distribution in custody. As neither the staff nor the inmates are immune to changing attitudes towards drugs, the societal factor highlights the broader structural context of drug use and considers the importance of understanding the complexity and continuity of inmates' drug use and offending, in order to effectively tackle their behaviour in prison.

The small Island of St Helena is a British Overseas Territory. In 1981 the British Nationality Act denied the islanders their British citizenship rights and in 2002 their rights as British citizens were fully restored. As a consequence of the return of British citizenship, a new wave of migration has occurred whereby many islanders are migrating to the UK. Embedded within an ethnographic framework, the thesis draws upon 68 interviews undertaken with St Helenians both on and off the island. Drawing upon the islanders stories, narratives and repertoires, this thesis oscillates between the two fields of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. The analysis combines the anthropological truth claims of the community, as well as utilizes a post-structuralist approach that investigates the data for a micro understanding of discourse, ideology, identity, nuance and complexity, that demonstrates the paradoxical investments for the islanders. For cultural analytical triangulation, the theoretical concepts of Althusser, Bourdieu, Plummer and Bakhtin have been drawn upon, to investigate the feelings, emotions, cultural values and symbolic practices as demonstrated by the St Helenian community themselves. This thesis is a study of St Helenianness alongside Britishness and Islandness. Migration, identity, Diaspora, transnationalism and citizenship are common themes within this thesis, but the contribution is specifically to island studies.

Dominated by a number of humanities-based disciplines and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis and French post-structuralism, queer theory emerged in the early 1990s as a critical project that problematised the theorisation of sexuality and its relation to lesbian and gay politics. The purpose of the thesis is to have a discursive conversation between queer theory and sociology. I want to consider the current unproductive relationship between the two. From both a queer and sociological perspective, I will examine, problematise and rework sociology’s uncritical reading of queer theory and queer theory’s general failure to acknowledge and engage with sociology, with the intent to move them towards disciplinary cross-fertilisation. I will argue that disciplinary cross-fertilisation can only happen if sociology reads queer theory carefully and critically and queer theory and sociology facilitate and promote discursive spaces that are theoretically and methodologically integrated. In considering their relationship, I will draw upon a number of diverse theoretical perspectives, for example: social-historical constructionism, symbolic interactionism, post structuralism, and feminist theory. I will also draw upon my ethnographic work on gay male male-to-female drag that took place in the United States between September 1995 and June 1997, with a brief revisit in February 1999. I will finally conclude by proposing that an ‘outsider-within perspective’ serve as a basis for future engagement between queer theory and sociology. It is my opinion that the facilitation and promotion of queer and sociological perspectives that are neither full outsiders nor full insiders to their disciplinary domain would generate the conditions for disciplinary cross-fertilisation.

Traditional analyses of popular or everyday culture have been couched in terms of, on the one hand, variants of the Frankfurt School view that it distorts or offers a false consciousness of an underlying reality, whilst on the other, the response from discourse theorists and more traditional forms of social constructionism has been philosophically conventionalist in arguing that discourses, definitions and labelling activities directly construct meaning. The argument of this thesis is that it is possible, via Dummett's reading of Frege, to construct a realist account of meaning or, more strictly, sense, which preserves an element of rationality in everyday cultural reception without thereby effecting a radical relativisation of the notion of what constitutes rational processes and practices. This is achieved via Dummett's Context Principle, through which it is argued that the actual meaning of an utterance is not given directly by the conventional meaning of its constituent terms and phrases, but rather that the object picked out, its reference, depends on the context in which the utterance occurs. Hence the terms and phrases offer no more than a clue, a route to the reference, not the actuality of the reference. Consequently, whilst the sedimented meanings of the elements from which an utterance is composed provide a structuring of meaning, the actual constitution of meaning will depend on the context. The thesis explores the view that meaning or sense has an open-ended, but ontological quality by examining a variety of issues and themes including reflexivity, forms of conventionalism, conceptions of the everyday, perspectives in phenomenological social theory and philosophy, rationality, semiotics, reference, discursivity, spatial and temporal locations of sense. It counterposes the emphasis on the contextual structuring of meaning as an effect of the subject's everyday appropriation of background routines, to passive constructions of subjectivity as offered by the Frankfurt School, and what it sees as overly direct constructions of meaning via classification systems in social constructionist approaches, which again have a reductive effect on the subject's role in the production of meaning.

Contemporary Western society is permeated by a culture in which personal tales can be told and listened to continuously, which is intensified by different modes of hi-tech mass media production and consumption. However, some narratives seem to flow into public discourses and find receptive audiences much more easily than others. Personal experience stories of excluded communities, when they feed into audiences that will listen to them, have the potential to bring about social change. Indeed, lifting the silence surrounding socially excluded lives is a legitimate, democratic means of achieving social and political justice. In a globalised world it is the degree to which a person has the capacity to control the story of their lives which is considered a significant means of empowerment. Refugee narratives are mostly represented by others, mainly as part of a political strategy to control their entry into Britain, and their lives whilst their claim for asylum is being considered. A range of narratives about refugees dominates public discourses, whilst personal refugee stories remain marginalised. There is limited scope for refugees to tell their stories, and restricted access to a potential audience. As a result they lack the capacity of agency in constructing their own lives, and in having any impact on their political and social circumstances. This qualitative study explores how personal refugee narratives are situated in a network of power relations. A methodological framework involving extensive fieldwork, which includes a number of in-depth life story interviews, provides the background to the study. Narrative analysis offers a profound insight into the extent to which refugees can be seen as agents in constructing their life stories. The current social climate and policy environment determines how refugee narratives are represented, which is epitomised in the asylum determination procedure, where refugee stories need to meet narrow criteria in order to be deemed credible. In contrast, the recent academic and government interest in the personal dimension of refugee integration within social cohesion discourses, indicates the urgent need for a narrative space, or a platform where different communities can share experiences. In this context, thinking about refugee narratives as constructed within a structural setting as well as conceptualising them as a vehicle to integration and empowerment, is high on the policy agenda and remain key areas of interest for future academic research.

The subject of this thesis is the nature and form of gambling in western society. Unlike other academic studies, which approach the subject in piecemeal fashion and treat it as essentially problematic, this research aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the activity by situating the phenomenological experience of modern gambling within a formal and historical framework, and examining it from a variety of theoretical perspectives. This thesis is divided into five Chapters. The first describes the historical development of the concept of chance and argues that, after a lengthy period in which it existed first as a sacred and later as an epistemological category, in the twentieth century chance was secularised and ascribed ontological status as an explanatory feature of the modern world. In Chapter Two, a study of the historical development of gambling forms, the social affiliation of the various groups associated with them complements the outline of chance given in Chapter One. Here it is argued that the nature of these games reflected wider social attitudes towards the perception of randomness, and also the general configuration of the society in which they were played. The development of games from their genesis in divination ritual to their formation into a recognisably modern gambling economy, is also traced, and the historical specificity of their various forms examined. The formal parameters and phenomenological experience of the gambling economy - the 'phenomenological sites' - is the subject of Chapter Three. It is argued that commercial organisation of games of chance in the late twentieth century is beginning to overcome the traditional stratification that for years has determined the social formation of gambling forms.